Sophia pressed her head back against the pillow and screamed with
pleasure. Her loins dissolved into rippling liquid gold. Her fingers dug
into the man's back and her legs clenched around his hips, trying to
crush him against her.
"Oh--oh--oh--" she moaned. The warmth spread to her toes, her
fingertips, her scalp, filling her with joy. She was so happy that she
wanted to cry.
As the blaze of ekstasia died down, she felt Manfred driving deep inside
her. She felt his hardness, his separateness, as she could not feel it a
moment ago when she was at her peak and they seemed to melt together,
one being.
His rhythm was insistent, inexorable, like a heartbeat. His hands under
her back were tense. He was fighting for his climax.
She delighted in the sight of his massive shoulders overshadowing her.
It was almost like being loved by a god.
Manfred's face was pressed against her shoulder, his open mouth on her
collarbone. She turned toward him and saw the light in his white-gold
hair. She slid one hand up to his hair and stroked it, while with the
other she rubbed his back in a circular motion.
She felt the muscles in his body tighten against her. He drew in a
shuddering breath.
"Yes--yes--good," she whispered, still stroking his hair, still
caressing his back.
He relaxed, panting heavily.
_He never makes much noise. Nothing like my outcries._
They lay without moving, she pleased by the warm weight of him lying
upon her, as if it protected her from floating away. The feel of him
still inside her sent wavelets of pleasure through her.
Still adrift on sensations of delight, she opened her eyes to stare up
into the shadows of the canopy overhead. On the heavy bed curtains to
her left, the late afternoon sun cast an oblong of yellow light with a
pointed arch at the top, the shape of an open window nearby. She knew
well the play of light in this unoccupied bedchamber in an upper part of
the castle. Manfred and she had met here many times.
They rolled together so that they lay side by side in a nest of red and
purple cushions. The down-filled silk bolster under them whispered as
they shifted their weight, and the rope netting that held it creaked.
Manfred propped his head up with one arm. His free hand toyed with the
ringlets of her unbound hair. She slid her palm over his chest.
She remembered an ancient sculpture she had seen in a home outside
Athens. The torso of a man, head missing, arms broken off at the
shoulders, legs gone below the knees, the magnificent body had survived
barbarian invasions, the coming of Christianity, the iconoclasts, the
Frankish conquest, to stand now on a plain pedestal in a room with
purple walls, the yellowish marble gleaming in the light of many
candles. Her host showed it only to his most trusted guests.
"Which god is this?" she had asked.
"I think it is just an athlete," said her host. "The old Greeks made
gods of their athletes."
Manfred's naked torso, pale as marble, seemed as beautiful. And was
alive.
She sighed happily. "How lucky I am that there was time for love in my
king's life this afternoon." She spoke in the Sicilian dialect,
Manfred's favorite of all his languages.
How lucky, she thought, that after all her years of wandering she had at
last found a place in the world where she was loved and needed.
His lips stretched in a smile, but his blue eyes were empty. Uneasiness
took hold of her. She sensed from the look on his face that he was about
to tell her something she did not want to hear.
* * * * *
In memory she heard a voice say, _Italy was ours not so long ago and
might be ours again_. So Michael Paleologos, the Basileus, Emperor of
Constantinople, had introduced the suggestion that she go to Italy, and
at just such a moment as this, when they were in bed together in his
hunting lodge outside Nicaea.
She had felt no distress at the idea of being parted from Michael. He
was a scrawny man with a long gray beard, and though she counted herself
enormously lucky to have attracted his attention, she felt no love for
him.
She had come to Lucera acting as Michael's agent and personal emissary
to Manfred--and resenting Michael's use of her but feeling she had no
choice. She was a present from one monarch to another. She ought to be
flattered, she supposed.
She had walked into Manfred's court in the embroidered jeweled mantle
Michael had given her, her hair bound up in silver netting. Lorenzo
Celino had conducted her to the throne, and she bowed and looked up. And
it was like gazing upon the sun.
Manfred von Hohenstaufen's smile was brilliant, his hair white-gold, his
eyes sapphires.
He stepped down from his throne, took her hand, and led her to his
eight-sided garden. First she gave him Michael's messages--news that a
Tartar army had stormed the crusader city of Sidon, leveled it, and
ridden off again--a warning that Pope Urban had secretly offered the
crown of Naples and Sicily, Manfred's crown, to Prince Edward, heir
apparent to the throne of England.
"Your royal master is kind, but the pope's secret is no secret," Manfred
had said, laughing and unconcerned. "The nobility of England have flatly
told Prince Edward that they will supply neither money nor men for an
adventure in Italy. The pope must find another robber baron to steal my
crown." And then he asked her about herself, and they talked about her
and about him.
She had thought all westerners were savages, but Manfred amazed her with
his cultivation. He knew more than many Byzantines, for whom
Constantinople--which they always called "the Polis," the City, as if it
were the only one--was the whole world. In the short time she and
Manfred strolled together that day, he spoke to her in Greek, Latin, and
Italian, and she later found out that he knew French, German, and Arabic
as well.
He sang a song to her in a tongue she did not recognize, and he told her
it was Provençal, the language of the troubadours.
He undid the clasp of her mantle and let it fall to the gravel. He
kissed her in the bright sunlight, and she forgot Michael Paleologos.
She belonged altogether to Manfred von Hohenstaufen.
* * * * *
Now, with a chill, she remembered that she did indeed _belong_ to
Manfred. She was not his mate but his servant.
His fingertips stroked her nipple lightly, but she ignored the tingle of
pleasure. She waited for him to say what he had to say.